On one run-of-the-mill Friday evening in April 2001, a Brighton and Hove Albion supporter logged on to the North Stand Chat forum online because he wanted to reminisce. Brighton were on the verge of sealing promotion from the Third Division (that would be confirmed nine days later). To fully experience the joy, that supporter reasoned, we should reflect upon what came before. His reflections were of half-time at Hereford in 1997, ultimately recognised as the day Brighton saved themselves.
“I still remember that feeling and will never forget it. I sat on the floor with a fag and I just couldn’t get up, couldn’t see how I could get on with the rest of my life. We came so close it still gives me goosebumps when I think about it.”
The user’s post provoked a steady stream of responses, a blue-and-white-striped online confessional. It was as if only the release of impending promotion, escaping one of a number of prisons into which they had been forced, could permit such emotional expression. Do it any earlier and you risk turning on a tap that just will not stop.
Brighton are now a club widely admired across Europe for their on- and off-field work. Their scouting and recruitment model, the pathways offered to young players, the contentment of their supporters and the work of Brighton-supporting owner (and billionaire) Tony Bloom are all exceptional, but the key is every stakeholder appearing to be governed by the same overarching maxims. Nothing happens here by accident.
But that is barely half of Brighton’s story. The decade or more during which they soared from League One to the Premier League‘s top half was not the start of something, but the ultimate vindication of something else. All of that, all of this, was made possible because a club stared its greatest fear in the face and those who loved it demonstrated the true meaning of ownership.
It took fighting and campaigning, actions and words, faith when faith was lost and the unity of football supporters across Europe against something that we had rarely faced before: the willful neglect of a football club by those we entrusted to cherish it. It led to groundbreaking protests that would, sadly, be adapted or replicated across the country over the following two decades. This is the story of how Brighton and Hove Albion are still a professional football club at all.
In October 1993, Brighton were reportedly £3m in debt and facing a High Court judgement on a winding-up order. They had lost to Notts County in the Second Division play-off final at Wembley in June 1991, a shot at the top flight 14 months before the Premier League era. Slowly then quickly, the extent of the club’s issues became apparent. They were both complex and achingly simple: too much money spent on too much underperformance for too long leading to too much of nothing good.
From Lancashire stepped forward Bill Archer, a DIY tycoon. He acquired a controlling stake for just £56.25, announced £800,000 investment to save the club’s immediate future and appointed David Bellotti, a former local Liberal Democrat MP, as chief executive. It would later emerge that the investment was secured via a loan using the stadium as collateral with interest charges of £40,000 every three months.
Archer and Bellotti were initially popular at Brighton. They removed Barry Lloyd as manager, who had become the source of great frustration to supporters. They appointed Liam Brady in his place, a legendary player and a decent man who would play a starring role further down the line. Brady took them clear of relegation trouble and, by the end of his first full season, there was some hope of a brighter future.
On 7 July, 1995, that future immediately darkened. The Argus ran a story: “Seagulls Migrate”. It reported that Brighton were selling their Goldstone Ground, home for almost 100 years, and moving to Portsmouth until a new stadium had been built. The ground sale was necessary for Brighton to pay off their debts and survive as a club, owner and chief executive would insist.
Some supporters were likely persuaded. The stadium plans were ambitious and the need to service debt well known. More to the point, English football supporters had barely experienced an asset-stripping owner before and so presumed good faith. Your local boy did good and then returned to take his beloved on; that was the typical status quo.
But it was still a PR disaster. There had been no consultation and no discussion, the supporters not included at any stage. They did not want to go to Portsmouth anymore than Portsmouth – its people, football supporters and police – would want them to arrive every other weekend. The only public words from those in charge were by Bellotti in his programme notes for a home game against Notts County. After stating the club’s case, promising investment if the local council agreed to their proposed development, Bellotti ended with two words that started the war: “Stop whining”.
In fact, three things had already happened. The council had already formally ruled out the proposed plan at Patcham Court Farm. Archer had already agreed the sale to a development firm named Chartwell. And, most unforgivably, the club’s Articles of Association had been amended to omit a clause dictating that shareholders of the club could not financially benefit from its sale.
“The most malicious thing that the owners, Bill Archer and Greg Stanley, did was alter the club’s Articles of Association so that they would benefit from any sale of the Goldstone,” supporter Brian Cowling says. “Two supporters with an accountancy background, Paul Samrah and the late Paul Whelch, discovered this. At that point, the fans’ protests had a focus.”
In September 1995, Brighton were due to play Bournemouth live on ITV, a rare occurrence. The notion of fan action in a visceral public sense was virtually alien, but supporters saw their chance to garner publicity. At half-time, they entered the pitch for a sit-down protest. It was the first time that Brighton’s plight had reached the wider public consciousness. The Articles of Association were eventually changed back. The club claimed that it had been the oversight of a lawyer.
The toxicity fuelled by mistrust dragged Brighton down. Brady resigned after six league defeats in seven games but had been broken by his working conditions. His replacement Jimmy Case, who had recently retired as a player to help out on the coaching staff, produced an initial bump in results but Brighton were soon again being cut adrift.
“Going to watch Brighton in those days was like visiting a sick relative,” says supporter Ian Burke. “You didn’t always want to go because you knew it wouldn’t be a nice experience but felt duty-bound to it. Despite all the encouragement and support you gave you could see them slowly slipping away and there was nothing that you could do about it.”
“Almost all the times I went along it was to cover off-field stories and the whole thing felt sad on every level,” says Dave Beckett, a Brighton supporter who worked as a local TV reporter during those years. “Popping into the Goldstone, where everyone had always been so vibrant. Now the ground was falling apart, everyone was worried about their jobs and – it seemed to me – lived in fear of Bellotti. Along with Archer, he knew the price of everything and value of nothing.”
All the while the issue of the stadium was looming. The council agreed with Chartwell for a one-year lease of the ground that would have been cheaper than Portsmouth, but the club rejected the solution. Chartwell set a date of 30 April for any lease agreement. After that, demolition could begin.
On 27 April, Brighton hosted York City. It was their final home game of the season and they had already been relegated to Division Three. After 15 minutes of the game, there was a mass protest in which the goalposts were broken and the tunnel ripped apart. Some supporters now concede that things went too far, but that only represented their sheer desperation. If this was it for the Goldstone, they intended to go out fighting. The match was abandoned.
Shortly after, Brady called Dick Knight to ask for his help or Brighton would die and urged him to form a consortium to take over the club. Brady offered personally to pay the £40,000 deposit for the one-year lease – it was rejected. At five minutes to midnight on 29 April, Archer announced that a deal had been agreed. It was the ultimate display of brinkmanship and a public demonstration of his power. This was his club, not theirs.
If 1995-96 birthed the anger and action of Brighton’s fanbase, the following season pushed them to the edge of reason and their club to the precipice. It also provoked a wave of concerted, nationwide campaigning of a like that English football had never seen before. And it might all have been for naught, were it not for one goal in one game. Had Brighton been relegated to non-league, who can be sure that they would have returned?
By the start of the season, Archer had stepped up his offensive and became the voice and face of the boardroom. The more supporters insisted – calmly or angrily – that him leaving would be best for everyone, the more stubborn he became. On the night before the first league game in Division Three, Archer issued a statement insisting that he would not be engaging in any takeover bid and that Brighton would be moving to Portsmouth, as he had always planned, at the end of the season. Cue another sit-in protest the next day.
The interested consortium, who by then had repeatedly made overtures to Archer, was led by Knight and Martin Perry, formerly of construction firm McAlpine. The local council and Football Association were convinced by the good faith and sustainability of their development plans. Archer had laid down four conditions on which he would step aside, which the consortium satisfied. But then he refused to show them the company accounts and effectively refused to engage.
Dropping a division did little to make Brighton competitive. With Case unable to inspire nor offer a distraction from the civil war, results were appalling. Brighton won their first league game of the season and subsequently took 10 points from their next 21 matches, marooned to the bottom of the Football League when Case was eventually sacked in December.
That only accelerated the ill-feeling and the urgency of action. Different factions of the support believed in different approaches, but it was agreed that, to get national media exposure, they would need to be creative. The sheer variety of protests was groundbreaking. Some were spontaneous, others organised in the days before. Most were law-abiding, a few pushed the envelope. All were for the same cause: the world needs to know what is happening here.
“It was a grass-root movement ably supported by local politicians like Ivor Caplin, then leader of Hove Council,” says supporter Jim Frank. “It was led by some very astute campaigners who pulled together a diverse group of people who perhaps otherwise might not have even met but were united in trying to save their football club. They are all heroes.”
Supporters protested against Bellotti at the Liberal Democrat party conference in Brighton. They protested peacefully outside the pub in Archer’s home village. They left one home game 15 minutes early, emptying the stands. They boycotted another, only entering at half-time when a steward opened a gate. They marched through Brighton to a home game and through London from Victoria Station to deliver a petition to the FA. They hung banners over bridges. That launched a campaign for Bellotti to be defeated in local council elections and succeeded. They took thousands of whistles into the Goldstone and blew them repeatedly. They used the formative days of the internet to connect with other supporters on newsgroups and create a brotherhood that crossed club divides.
We are perennially tempted to overinflate the importance of individual moments, but it barely feels hyperbolic to say that without 8 February, 1997, there may no longer be a Brighton and Hove Albion. Through one of the online newsgroups, a 15-year-old Plymouth supporter, Richard Vaughan, had the idea for a Fans United Day, when supporters of different clubs could come to the Goldstone for a home game in the shirts of their clubs and display support for the cause. A fixture against Hartlepool United was chosen.
Before that Saturday, Case’s replacement Steve Gritt had started with nine points from eight games, a clear improvement but far from enough to keep Brighton up. By late morning, supporters had started to gather. They had come from as far away as the United States, Germany and Spain, but most wore the shirts of English clubs who understood the grim truth: if this could happen to Brighton, it could happen to their club. This went beyond loyalty to a football team or a town; football itself needed protecting.
By kick-off, the Goldstone welcomed three times its usual crowd and they created an atmosphere of extraordinary unity. There in the stands was Real Madrid and Eintracht Frankfurt, but also Millwall, Chelsea, Sheffield Wednesday, Manchester City and countless more besides. Most had been taught the songs. They chanted for the players and against the owners and with the cause. And something remarkable happened: Brighton won 5-0.
Fans United Day would become a tradition, a means of football supporters coming together in support of whichever causes felt most urgent on whichever battleground was required. As Cowling says, the great shame is that Brighton wasn’t the end of miscreant owners, but the start. “I just wish more good had come from our troubles,” he says. “It was very sad to see the likes of Doncaster, Coventry and Bury suffer after us.”
In 1997, it changed Brighton’s future for good. It persuaded supporters that they were not alone pissing into the wind, but instead had the back-up – physical and emotional – of thousands of their peers from hundreds of towns and cities like theirs and thus kept alive the flame of energy and outrage. It showed the team that those supporters never once blamed them and demonstrated to the fans that the team still had the fight to survive relegation. It proved to Archer and Bellotti that the work to remove them from their roles was never likely to stop, only increase in fervour. It may have also persuaded the Football Association to finally organise mediation between the parties, for that soon followed.
Brighton played eight more home league games in 1996-97 after Fans United Day. They won seven of those games and drew the other. Their last away league win of the season came on 2 November – that appalling record continued until the end. But at the Goldstone, as a fanbase prepared to say farewell to their home, Brighton gave themselves a shot at on-pitch redemption.
The fortnight that changed everything began with the announcement that nobody dared believe in. After mediation, arranged by the FA and overseen by the Centre For Dispute Resolution, a deal was eventually agreed between Archer and the consortium headed by Knight. Archer retained his stake, something he’d always insisted upon. But he and Knight would each own 49.5 per cent of the club, with Perry owning the golden 1 per cent. Supporters didn’t need to be told that Perry was on the side of righteousness.
Four days later, Brighton said goodbye to the Goldstone before, during and after a home game against Doncaster Rovers. The move to Portsmouth would never happen, but Brighton would be forced, with the stadium sold by Archer, to share with Gillingham 70 miles away. The dream of a new, shiny, permanent home lived on with Knight and the prospective takeover, but that didn’t make the loss of their natural habitat any less emotional.
The game, just like everything else in Brighton’s history, may have ended in cheer but only after walking the stony path. They were reduced to 10 men after fewer than 20 minutes and yet took the lead through Stuart Storer and somehow held on. The news came through that Hereford had lost at Leyton Orient, meaning that Brighton now needed only a draw away at that same team to stay up and relegate their opponents.
At full-time, Brighton fans took to the pitch to cut up and share the pieces of a place that their hearts would never quite leave. Grass was dug up and planted in gardens across Sussex, as if hoping to satisfy the theory of water memory. Seats were ripped out and kept in garages and sheds and spare rooms. Somebody shimmied halfway up a floodlight pylon to retrieve a clock face.
The Goldstone wasn’t one of English football’s aesthetic wonders. It would win few awards for architecture nor away fan experience (save the high chance of three points). It was an assorted collection of non-matching terraces and seated stands. Metal had rust, concrete crumbled, every porcelain bowl had a crack and every corner an odour. But it was cherished by many and lost by all in favour of a retail park. The Amex is a wonderfully modern stadium with a fine design; moving there was and is a statue to progress. But it will take another half-century until the myths have seeped into the foundations quite the same.
A week later, Brighton faced their judgement day and we meet our story where we started: half-time at Hereford. Kerry Mayo, Brighton-born, had scored an own goal and Albion trailed 1-0. The television reports show a row of supporters in the away end sat still with their hands up to their mouths or either side of their temple. The work would always have been worth it, but what if it had all been for this? No home and no Football League place.
On 62 minutes, striker Craig Maskell controlled the ball on his chest and produced a dipping shot that cannoned back off the post and back into play. Substitute Robbie Reinelt reacted first and, with his weaker foot, swept the ball home in front of an away end that lost their collective minds. And then, as left-back Stuart Tuck said: “the feeling quickly turns to reality as you know you’ve got plenty of minutes on the clock to see it out.”
Brighton did see it out. For once, there was to be no ill-timed punch in the gut or a rug pulled from beneath them. On the pitch in the aftermath, a cameraman gets hold of Dick Knight. “I’ve had two matches in charge, and I hope they’re not all as tense as this,” he says between beaming smiles. On the coach on the way home, the Brighton squad would drink beer, eat fish and chips and dance in the aisles on their way home to a city in celebration.
The last word goes to Steve Gritt, Brighton’s miracle manager, who sits seriously and glassy-eyed on that bus when the camera reaches him, like a child who has just watched their first war film. “I wouldn’t want to go through all that again,” Gritt says. He means the 90 minutes that have just gone, of course. But I’m sure, 26 years later, he will allow us a little extrapolation.
Brighton’s struggle could never end there. Too much had gone wrong for too long for instant salvation. They were forced to play 70 miles from Brighton in Gillingham’s Priestfield Stadium for two seasons. The next year, Brighton again finished 23rd in the fourth tier, albeit this time with the safety net of a catastrophic Doncaster Rovers team going through its own crisis.
Even when Brighton did return home, it was to Withdean Stadium, a converted athletics track owned by the local council that had only 7,000 seats – the majority of which were temporary – and provided a glum fan experience after the memories of the Goldstone.
This was no short-term solution. Brighton stayed at Withdean Stadium for almost 12 years while their fight to build a new stadium continued. It was in March 1998 that a field in Falmer, between Sussex University and the A27, was first identified by Albion chief executive Martin Perry as a possible development site. It hosted its first game in August 2011.
Here again, fans became campaigners and protestors. Despite local councillors backing the project and a referendum producing a 67.6 per cent vote in favour of Falmer as the location, so began a procession of public inquiries, opposition from Falmer residents and Lewes District Council, intervention from deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. Managers were lost due to the lack of permanent facilities, potential stymied and Seagulls’ wings clipped. But nobody ever gave up.
“Where Brighton fans were always really shrewd was transforming all that anger into some brilliant light-hearted campaigns,” Beckett says. “Releasing a record, getting fans to bombard John Prescott’s department with Valentine’s Day flowers when we needed the Government’s help, the postcards from 30,000 of us at the play-off final begging for a ground – genius ideas.”
All the while, Knight offered a sanctuary through his composed ownership. After the civil war, peacetime had broken out. It took the takeover and subsequent investment by Tony Bloom to get the ground built, but Knight became a leader of the movement in his shining armour. Under Bloom during the last decade, Brighton’s success has accelerated as if a club is subconsciously determined to make up for lost time and make good on what was fought for in the 1990s and beyond.
Football clubs often feel like permanent status, social institutions possessing eternal life. In the right hands, they should be: the interest never wanes and there will always be another season, a new manager, new players and sometimes new stadiums too. These are the mileposts of progress or decline.
But the opposite is true. Football clubs exist because people work for their continued existence. If we’re lucky, those in charge carry that burden and we simply get to be supporters. If we’re not, we must be custodians and guardians and protectors and do it all for nothing but love and the hope that the next generation gets to enjoy the same connection as we did.
“As Brighton fans we’re having the time of our lives,” says Frank. “But it’s also heartening to see so many younger fans – kids in Brighton – proudly wearing the club’s kit. That just didn’t happen during the ‘war years’ and the club lost a generation of fans. Huge credit must go to Tony Bloom who has totally transformed the club – long may that continue. But we won’t ever forget the crucial role that Dick Knight, and the fans played, in helping to save our club.”
On Thursday night, Brighton welcome AEK Athens to the Amex. It will understandably be perceived as a mark of their strength in the present and their potential for the future, the model club where everything works. It should also be a reminder to reflect upon history. There was never any plan for this. Supporters did not fight so that Brighton could one day be here, just so Brighton could still be anything at all tomorrow. But the effect is still the same. None of this happens without all of that.
“I’m Brighton, and I’m proud of it – I was back then and I am now,” says Burke. “Our experience is unique. The ethos of the club, our club, my club is born from those days. Everything about the club makes me proud. It has and will never lose its heart and soul because it knows, understands and respects its past.”
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